You're at the end of a peninsular, you're at the mouth of Narragansett Bay.
All the shipping, all the passage, goes up the right hand side
During the war, World War II, which is very interesting, is that
from this point on both sides there were
submarine nets and there were mine fields.
and out in front of the lighthouse there were cables that were
underneath the sea which gathered
signature data from the propellers of ships that came up both sides
They were afraid of German ships, German submarines coming up into
area. And for that reason
when that old foundation was uncovered in the 1938 hurricane,
the army had actually put a concrete cap on top of that
with a search light and a machine gun nest and a large
optical range finder
that could determine if there was any enemy shipping out there
Nothing much happened here at Beavertail
during World War II, with one exception
That is that on the last day of the war there was a German U-boat
that was sunk out here, the last day of the war.
Apparently the U-boat didn't get any notice
from the German Navel high command
That the war was over. The war had been over
they declared that the submarine should come back to Germany
instead the submarine sank an American coal ship right
off the coast, about 5 miles south of us here
and both the Coast Guard and the Navy came in and
and depth charged it. Now it is a
tomb that the German government maintains
is a tomb and should not be dived on.